Summary of Justin Fox's The Myth of the Rational Market - E-book - ePub

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 After the theft of his manuscript, Yale University economics professor Irving Fisher went right back to work. He had a habit of overcoming setbacks that might cause a lesser person to despair. His ideas began to have an impact in his lifetime, and after his death, they took off. #2 The idea that the stock market is a place of pure rationality was first put forward by Irving Fisher in the 1920s.
However, this idea was not unique to him. In Paris, mathematics student Louis Bachelier studied the price fluctuations on the Paris Bourse in a similar spirit. #3 Bachelier used the assumptions of the bell curve to depict price movements on the Paris exchange. He began with the insight that the mathematical expectation of the speculator is zero, and that price changes in an instant are unpredictable in direction but predictably small. #4 When he died in 1946, one year before Irving Fisher, no one on the trading floor was making use of his ideas.
His colleagues were nonplussed by his interest in markets.